The tabloid ecosystem and crimes against society

by Daryl Champion

When Elisabeth Fritzl gained liberty from her father late in April 2008, she and her children required extensive psychiatric and, in some cases, physical rehabilitation: Elisabeth had been imprisoned in a modified cellar beneath the family home in the Austrian town of Amstetten for nearly twenty-four years. During that time, from August 1984, Josef Fritzl raped his daughter more than 3,000 times; Elisabeth gave birth to seven children by her father.1

Psychological and emotional security and privacy were para-
mount in the rehabilitation pro-
cess of Elisabeth and her two eldest children in particular. After more than two months of treat-
ment in a psychiatric hospital, in July 2008 they were very dis-
creetly established in a new home with new identities – the first major step in establishing
a new life in the outside world.

Then, in early February 2009,
the Sun, a British daily tabloid

published by News Group Newspapers, a subsidiary of News Corporation, hunted down the whereabouts of Elisabeth and her children and published a two-page spread that included a photograph of Elisabeth and a young woman, believed to be her eldest and probably most psych-
ologically damaged child, Kerstin. Mother and daughter were on the street in the village they had not long called home; they had been shopping. Elisabeth appeared to be turning around to look at whoever was taking clandestine photographs of her without her knowledge or permission; the Sun had pixelated her face to preserve a fig leaf of privacy for Elisabeth and a fig leaf of integ-
rity for itself.

Elisabeth issued a statement through her lawyer that she believed the press had approach-
ed a relative offering large sums of money for photographs and information from the time her story first came to light, and that the latest information on her

whereabouts had earned the relative a six-figure payment.2 The statement made her position clear: “The permanent and pers-
istent attempts of media repre-
sentatives to get in touch with me and my children are an un-
bearable disturbance of my life.
I do not wish any contact with
the press and will not give any interviews”.3

The Sun’s eventual success in publishing a photograph of Elisabeth Fritzl followed more than nine months of unrelenting media invasion of her and her children’s privacy. The Sun was certainly not alone in what became an international spect-
acle engulfing the Friztls, but British photographers were singled out as “the main perpet-
rators”.4 Almost immediately after their liberation, as Elisabeth and her children were undergoing intense therapy at the Amstetten–Mauer psychiatric hospital, photographers were reported to be going to extra-
ordinary lengths to gain access to the hospital and its grounds. Some of their antics are at once comical and outrageous: wearing camouflage gear and perching themselves in trees; disguising themselves as police and

cleaners; one was reported to have dug himself into the earth, complete with provisions, and covered himself with a bird-
watcher’s hide; another report-
edly attempted to paraglide into the hospital’s grounds; another hovered over the facility in a helicopter. Hospital security had to be dramatically increased, especially after a photographer assaulted and injured a guard,

and guards had to be supplied with thermal imaging cameras and sniffer dogs to detect invading photographers.5 The “upstairs” Fritzl children – Lisa, aged 15 in May 2008; Monika,
14; and Alexander, 12 – were also the objects of similarly un-
ethical media attention, necess-
itating the employment of sec-
urity guards at their school.6

When the story broke in late April 2008, the priority of the tabloid press was to procure and publish photographs of a post-liberation Elisabeth; until the Sun’s delivery of such an image in February